Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  Selene knew he was right. “Maybe we go up first without Father,” she ventured. “Rig a pulley system—”

  Maryam interrupted. “It will take us at least forty-five minutes to get to the top, then another twenty to jury-rig a pulley for the stretcher and haul Father up. We have to take him with us the first time. Otherwise, the probability of success becomes vanishingly slim.”

  “But how do we get—?” Philippe began.

  “I’ll carry him.” Selene bent down and lifted her father carefully off the litter.

  “Even She Who Dwells on the Heights needs to use her hands to climb that slope,” Theo protested.

  Maryam had already reached into her pack for a long length of nylon rope. With a speed and ingenuity that put Flint’s to shame, she fashioned a quick harness and slung it over Selene’s shoulders. With Theo’s help, Maryam maneuvered Zeus’s limp form into the ropes, his legs dangling around Selene’s hips and his arms over her shoulders. His head rested against her neck.

  Theo stepped back to admire Maryam’s handiwork. “Not exactly Luke and Yoda, but not bad.”

  Despite the weight of her father’s limp form on her back, Selene found herself chuckling.

  Theo gave her a puzzled smile as he helped secure the gold bow to Selene’s hip so it’d be within easy reach. “What are you laughing at? You don’t even know what it means.”

  “Sure I do. I watched The Empire Strikes Back while I was in Rome.”

  “Without me?” He seemed more disappointed than angry.

  She hesitated. “I can watch it again.”

  He stared at her as if contemplating the offer.

  I’m proposing a future together, she realized, and he hasn’t rejected it. She waited for him to say something more. When he didn’t, a wave of regret rushed through her. I should’ve said more to him in the Pantheon. I should’ve apologized for lying to him. I should’ve admitted how much I’d missed him. How much I love him. Instead, she said aloud, “It’s taking all my willpower not to throw you over my shoulder and carry you off this mountain to somewhere where you can’t tumble to your death or be eaten by giants from Tartarus. You know that, don’t you?”

  He nodded, a smile hovering on his lips. “But you haven’t.”

  She took a deep breath, finally understanding why it seemed to matter so much to him that she allow him to throw himself into danger. Despite her near immortality and his humanity, it made them, somehow, equals.

  “I would keep you safe if I could,” she said. “Not just today. But every day.”

  He didn’t reply, but she heard the sharpness of his breathing, as if her words had tightened his chest.

  “But that’s not my job, is it?” she asked.

  “Not if it means locking me away in a box, like Eos did to Tithonus.”

  Selene remembered how Eos, Goddess of the Dawn, had fallen in love with the mortal Tithonus and begged Zeus to grant him immortality. Zeus had complied, but Eos forgot to ask that her lover be given eternal youth as well. Tithonus grew so aged, so weak, that eventually he shrank into a grasshopper. Eos had placed her tiny lover in a box to carry with her everywhere.

  I can’t decide what’s best for Theo. I can’t make him immortal. One day, he will grow old. He will die, while I’ll barely look middle-aged. I’ll have to be okay with that.

  She nodded at him, a silent assent to his demand.

  Theo’s gaze warmed, but he didn’t reply.

  Esme’s throaty giggle broke the sudden silence between them. “Enough flirting, you two.”

  “Not everyone’s thinking about sex all the time,” Selene shot back, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks.

  Philippe jumped in. “Oui, Mama, leave them alone.” He put a restraining hand on Esme’s elbow to protect Selene from his mother—or vice versa. He cast a worried glance at his stepfather farther down the slope.

  Flint shouted up to him, “Do you feel the electricity in the air?”

  “Um …” Philippe’s eyes darted between Theo and Selene.

  “He means from the storm,” Selene said quickly. Flint was right; the air seemed to hum as the clouds overhead darkened like a new bruise. “We need to move.”

  She hitched Zeus a little higher onto her shoulders and started toward the slender ridge that led to Mytikas. The others followed. Flint, she noticed, had donned a rock-climbing harness—not around his waist, but his chest. He carried a long coil of rope over his shoulder, along with a variety of carabiners, ratchets, and a handlebar. He handed another coil of rope to Philippe, who stayed close beside him as they stepped onto the ridge.

  “He’ll be slow,” Maryam stated. “We must keep going.”

  Selene felt guilty, but she knew her sister was right. Zeus had to get to the summit.

  The ridge stretched before her like a catwalk. A low cloud disguised the drop on either side—she wasn’t sure if that was better or worse than seeing the valley three thousand meters below. She took a deep breath and focused on the painted red circles marking the path.

  Theo’s voice sounded strained. “I feel like Pac-Man. Just follow the dots, right?”

  “Not sure what you mean this time, but yes.” She stepped forward. Normally, the journey would’ve been simple for someone with her agility and strength, but her concern for her father stiffened her movements, and the combination of his awkward weight and the bow hanging off her body made her balance tenuous.

  “Let me take the bow,” Theo said.

  Selene shook her head. She needed her weapon within reach.

  “Or I could carry your dad,” he offered, sounding far less confident.

  Selene snorted. “You’d topple off the ridge like a drunk bacchant. Besides, this is my responsibility.” I’m the one who knew he was rotting away in that cave for decades and never bothered to go to him until it was too late. “I’ll be fine.” She walked quickly forward to prove her point—and almost twisted her ankle on a loose rock. It skittered over the side and plummeted soundlessly into the cloud.

  Theo swore softly then turned to Maryam. “You got another line in that pack of yours?” She handed him a length of red climbing rope.

  He started to tie one end around his own waist and the other around Selene, but Maryam stopped him. “You tie terrible knots, has anyone ever told you that?”

  Theo quirked a smile at Selene. “Yes, actually.”

  Maryam refastened the rope to both their waists. “You realize that if one of you falls, there’s a very good chance you’re just going to take the other down with you.”

  Selene held her breath, waiting for Theo to untie the rope. Yet when he looked up, he held her eyes and said solemnly, “Yeah, that’s the idea.”

  Selene swallowed hard and nodded. She wanted desperately to rip the rope from his body, but that’s exactly what she’d just promised not to do. If we’re truly equals, then he can share my risk, she knew. And he wants to share it. I never thought he’d feel that way again.

  The red rope stretched between them now, a physical reminder of the link they’d forged, through life and death and back again. Suddenly, she didn’t want to free him from its pull; she wanted to reel him in instead. To yank him, hard and fast, into her arms. To say with her embrace what she still couldn’t find the words to say aloud. There will be time for that, she thought, unable to repress a shudder of anticipation. When we get off the mountain, we can finally pick up where we left off on that night above New York Harbor.

  Red dot to red dot, she moved carefully across the ridge, Theo’s footsteps echoing her own. She could hear his heart tripping in double time.

  The ridge wasn’t flat; that was part of the problem. It sloped steeply to the right, forcing her to shimmy along, one foot sliding before the other, while trying to prevent Zeus’s skinny limbs from scraping against the sharp slabs of rock.

  Every time the wind blew, the clouds shifted. She caught a glimpse of clear sky, a brilliant, hot blue heating the valley below, where the temperature would soar into the ni
neties by noon. Beyond the wooded mountain gorge and rocky slopes, the land flattened until it reached a narrow beach along the Aegean. The sea itself lay beyond, a flat, gleaming expanse that seemed to fill half the world.

  “I’ve never seen the ocean look so vast,” Theo marveled.

  “I remember this view. We’re so high up that we’re looking down on the sea instead of out at it.”

  “But let me guess—the death-defying rock scramble isn’t how you guys used to get up to Olympus.”

  “No. I suspect we flew there in our chariots, although I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Oh, man. I’d give my Harvard doctorate for a flying chariot right about now.”

  They kept climbing, and Theo kept talking, his voice another rope, stronger than any braided nylon, tying them together. “When we get up top, do I get my own marble palace with a soaking tub and a bowl of ambrosia? Or is that too much to ask?”

  Selene laughed. “More like a spiny summit with a Greek flag, from what I can see. Our palaces were never exactly on the summit. It’s too small for that. They were”—she struggled for the words—“above it. Or … not of it at all.”

  “You mean they were on a different plane?”

  “Sort of. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Huh.”

  Selene knew that if he’d had any more breath to spare, he would’ve continued to ply her with questions. Once, she would’ve been grateful for the respite from his curiosity, but now she didn’t want the conversation to end. It stopped her from panicking about her father’s ragged breaths against her neck. Besides, she’d missed this.

  “You know I don’t remember everything from my godhood,” she said. “Olympus is a little foggy.”

  “Hah. That’s an understatement,” Theo said as another bank of vapor rolled past, blocking the view.

  Selene surprised herself by laughing.

  “Keep talking,” he urged. “It’s helping keep my mind off the whole tumbling-to-my-death thing.”

  “Well, I didn’t really have my own home on Olympus—I preferred the forests. But my mother lived here in a marble palace my father built for her, as far away from his wife’s as possible. I remember her sitting in the sun in the courtyard, weaving, spinning. But whenever Apollo or I would visit, she’d put down her work and listen to our woes. It was … peaceful there.”

  “I wish I’d had a chance to meet Leto,” Theo said gently. “She sounds like a good mom.”

  “She was the Goddess of Motherhood. I was lucky.”

  “Do you ever … think about having kids?”

  Selene had to stop herself from rounding on him. It wasn’t a question she’d ever allowed a man to ask. But the rope that tied them together reminded her she wasn’t allowed to push him away again. If she did, she’d only tumble after him.

  “After you and I …” she managed. The image of his naked body beneath hers on the riverbank came rushing back to her. Had sex? Slept together? What do I call it?

  “After we made love?” he prompted, pronouncing the words with careful emphasis.

  She cleared her throat and kept her eyes fixed on the rocks as she went on. “After we made love, I didn’t get pregnant, in case you’re wondering. And since then, I learned that I can’t. No goddess can anymore.” When Theo said nothing, she wondered if she’d just put a quick end to their nascent reconciliation. Does he want kids? It was, she realized, a question—like so many others—she’d never bothered to ask.

  Theo stayed quiet for a long while. The end of the ridge was in sight now, and Selene was suddenly sure that if he didn’t respond before they got there, he never would.

  “I’m not sorry,” she said, unable to stand the silence. “Motherhood isn’t for me. I’ve been given all the world’s children to protect, just not my own. To me, that’s a fair trade.” She paused and finally looked back at Theo. She’d been honest. Now it was his turn.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but Esme, who’d already made it across the ridge, interrupted with a shout. “Stop dawdling! And tell my lumbering husband to get a move on, too!”

  The wind picked up around them, tossing the shreds of cloud like ribbons in a maiden’s hair. Selene’s conversation with Theo would have to wait.

  The storm would not.

  Chapter 45

  ATHANATOI

  The mountain climbed steeply upward into a great, twisting, nearly vertical bowl, the spires rising around its circumference like organ pipes.

  Selene yelled down to Flint, still fifty yards behind with Philippe, “I’m not sure you can get up this!”

  He waved her onward angrily, and Philippe called back, “I’ve got him. Don’t worry!”

  She turned back to the rock wall, put one hand on a red marker, and started to haul herself upward. After a moment, Philippe clambered lightly past her with a rope over his shoulder. He hammered a piton into the rock face and looped the rope through it. He threw the end of the line back down to Flint, who attached his handlebar ascender and harness. Then, using only the strength of his massive arms, he began to jerk the handlebar upward, climbing the mountain six inches at a time. He’d removed his thick sweater again, and the wide muscles of his chest and biceps bulged against the fabric of his shirt. His withered legs in their braces hung uselessly below him, swinging as he lurched up the cliff. His strength may no longer be supernatural, Selene marveled, but his tenacity sure is.

  For the next half hour, the procession of gods worked its way up the mountain. The spaces between them widened. Maryam took the lead this time, moving stiffly but surely in her armor, carrying her long spear slung across her back. Dennis climbed at his own lethargic pace, occasionally stopping to take a swig from his water bottle or to banter with Esme. Philippe dashed ahead sporadically, affixing the ropes, then waited for Flint to pull himself up.

  All the while, the clouds grew thicker, the air colder, and the hum of electricity more pronounced.

  Selene, slowed by her father’s awkward weight, dropped back. For the most part, Theo stayed close behind her, helping to stabilize her on the steepest parts of the slope, sometimes scrabbling ahead to help.

  While they climbed, he said nothing. But his firm grip on her hand as he helped haul her and her father upward spoke volumes. He was not abandoning her, not yet. For once, it was Selene who couldn’t stay silent. “I’d understand, you know. If you wanted children.”

  His eyes flicked to hers and away again. “There are many ways to have children in your life.” He paused for a long breath before he continued. “There’s only one way to have you.” He didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t a promise, just a statement of fact. But it finally gave her the strength to say what she should’ve said long before.

  “I’m sorry. For lying. When I fell from your arms that night above the harbor, I didn’t expect to survive. I was willing to die to see you live.” The words came out in a rush. “When I washed ashore, I wanted to go to you. But I’d almost gotten you killed, and I knew Saturn still lived. If you were with me, you weren’t safe. I kept reminding myself of that. I had to, every time I wanted to call or write or just hop on a damn plane and fly across the ocean and back into your arms.” She took a final deep breath. “I’m sorry. I should’ve trusted you.”

  Theo said nothing, his gaze inward.

  She kept talking, finally speaking aloud the words she’d never even admitted to herself. “I thought we’d be all right eventually. That you’d move on, and I would, too. I was wrong. I never stopped wanting you beside me.” She hesitated for an instant, hoping he’d say that he felt the same way. But he remained silent, his mouth clenched tight as if he didn’t trust himself to speak.

  “No matter what happens today,” she finished. “I want you to know that.”

  For once, she couldn’t read the expression in his eyes. She didn’t think he was angry—maybe just too full of emotion to find the right words. It wasn’t the response she’d wanted, but as she clambered up to join Esme, Maryam, and Dennis just below t
he summit, then lowered Zeus to the ground, she felt like another weight had lifted from her back. At least I’ve been honest.

  Zeus’s head lolled to the side; she checked his pulse. Slow, faint, and getting worse.

  She peered up at the mist-shrouded peak a few yards above them. “Scooter? Are you up here? We need to get the pit opened!”

  Beside her, Maryam put down her own pack but held tight to her spear. Philippe and Flint appeared. Sweat had glued Flint’s shirt to his body, and he shivered violently. Philippe helped him back into his sweater like an anxious parent.

  Scooter popped out from behind one of the rocky spires, still wearing his broken winged cap.

  “Hello, darlings!” he called cheerily to his siblings, as if meeting them for brunch at the local bistro. “You made it! And look who’s all set for his retirement plan in Tartarus.” He yanked on a chain, dragging Saturn forward like a feral dog on a leash.

  The Titan wore a thick collar fashioned from his own sickle; even now, the divine weapon’s razor-sharp blade dug into Saturn’s neck, forcing him to hold his head thrown back at an unnatural angle. Chains bound the god’s ankles and wrists. Selene recognized their shimmering links—Scooter had made the restraints from the golden net forged by Hephaestus in the distant past. At the height of his power, the Smith had imbued the net with one very specific property: Only those who loved him could rip through it.

  Scooter may not have always loved his stepbrother, but he does now, she realized with some surprise, or he couldn’t have torn apart the net to make the chains. She gave Flint a pointed glance: He may be the Trickster, but he’s our Trickster.

  Scooter had chosen the fetters wisely: Saturn could never break them. Then again, his greatest power had never been his strength of arms. He was the Wily One, the God of Time, and Selene had not forgotten how his words had the power to suck her into the past. Neither, it seemed, had Scooter. He’d shoved the sickle’s thick wooden handle between Saturn’s teeth, binding it there with more of the Smith’s golden threads. The effect was grotesque. Medieval.